On Televised Revolution: In Review (Trev:Ir) this week we get a bit serious. We scale back the sitcom talk and instead focus in on the dramas that have been dominating our viewing over recent weeks. We take a run at Game of Thrones and Awake, while also dealing with the horrors of the 2 Broke Girls finale and ponder just where The Office is heading.

Dan Barrett is the Content Director of Televised Revolution. His musings on television have been heard across ABC Radio, on websites like The Guardian and Crikey, and drunkenly in pubs across the country. At night he spends too many hours watching repeats of Cheers.

4 Responses

I think that non-cliffhanger two parters can be awesome when done right. To use some examples from Star Trek, look at TNG’s All Good Things, or DS9’s Way of The Warrior. Both were well regarded episodes that took advantage of the ninety minute run time.

I thought you both pretty much nailed Awake, I am going to stick through the 13 now just to see where it goes, the only other things of interest about the show for me are:

– The use of color: Warm for the wife and cold for the son works extremely well in placing the audience in the right space and giving a great mood to everything.

– What ended up making me continue with the show was the fact it was a procedural. I realised, I don’t even watch procedurals any more, and it was kind of cool to be in one again. The irony here is I CANT FREAKING FOLLOW THE PROCEDURAL!! It was OK in the first few episodes, but now I watch the show not really knowing what actually happened in the case-of-the-week and am just following the meta story.

– The meta story really has quite a stink of lameness to it, I am wondering if they have some better rabbit to pull out of the hat that finishes up the 13 episodes nicely.

I was going to write a longer bit on Game of Thrones, but as someone who has read all the books (nearly) it is quite hard to discuss it properly. In a nutshell I am glad you guys are still liking it even when the ‘too many characters’ issue is a bit daunting to most non-readers I speak to about it.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE Jason Isaacs (have done for yeeears), but I haven’t watched this yet. I’m not really enthusiastic about an emo police procedural with a gimmick.

Additionally, it reminds me of a shitty Demi Moore movie – Passion of Mind (2000) – which I only watched (with much fast forwarding) for the awesome William Fichtner. In POM, the main protagonist has 2 realities on either side of the Atlantic with 2 boyfriends and 2 shrinks. From memory it was some sort of childhood trauma that caused the “split”, but I can’t remember which reality was “real”. Meh.